


The Family Tea

by DHW



Series: Kitty's Tearoom [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-07-08 21:17:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19876222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DHW/pseuds/DHW
Summary: Eleven-year-old Rupert Giles spends a summer in Devon with his Grandfather.Written for Summer_of_Giles 2019.[Please be advised that this story contains minor, off-screen character death].





	The Family Tea

The teashop on Fore Street had been built when the first Queen Liz had sat upon the throne. For three hundred years, it had stood between the river and the winding street (first dirt, then cobble, then Tarmac), wattle and daub façade bright and welcoming.

It had not always been a teashop. Or even a bakery. First, it had been an alms house; later, a butchers, then a tailors. For a brief period around 1750, it had been a Coffee House, where rusticated students and retired Dons taught Philosophy and French and Mathematics to the Devon countrymen over cups of inky liquid. Later still, it became a grocers, Smallcombe and Sons, passing through the generations until there were none left to take the mantle.

In 1923, for the princely sum of £320, a Mr. Thomas Giles purchased the property, then little more than an empty shell, and set about its transformation. In autumn, a husk; by the following summer a bakery, complete with tearoom and veranda. The work had been extensive. The walls had been whitewashed, both inside and out. The wood varnished and the floor polished. Tables and chairs, in the new Art Deco style, had been brought up from London, and were set with crisp white tablecloths and vases full of flowers from the town market. In the kitchen, new ovens and counters were installed; a Belfast sink sat proudly in the corner, white and gleaming. The back garden was tamed, and thick paving slabs of Cornish stone lain in concentric circles overlooking the river. Finally, a week before opening, the sign above the door was repainted. It read, ‘Kitty’s Tea Rooms’ in large, gilt letters. 

Whomever ‘Kitty’ had been remained a mystery. 

Mr Giles, whose left leg was stiff with shrapnel, worked in the kitchen. His wife, Edna, and their two children, William and John, lived in the rooms above. In the summer, customers would sit upon the veranda with pots of tea and slices of cake, enjoying the English sunshine and the quiet burble of the river Dart. In winter, they would dine indoors, cradling tea cups in chilled fingers, delighting in the warmth that emanated from the cast iron radiators upon the walls. Rain or shine, wind or snow, the tearoom was rarely empty, attracting both tourists and locals alike. 

As the years passed, the tearoom grew. The boys grew, too. As children they spent their summers waiting upon tables and washing pots and pans in the big Belfast sink. Later, they worked in the kitchen, kneading loaves and decorating delicate french pastries and cream-filled fairy cakes. Later still, they went to sea. To war. And when it was over, only one returned. 

That day, the day John came home with cap in hand and a kitbag on his back, Tom closed the teashop, and Edna placed a vase upon counter beside the elderly till. Each summer, she filled it with sweet williams from the garden, and in the winter, with willow withies from the church in which her son had been buried. 

And so life went on. Tom baked cakes. Edna manned the till. And John left for the city, for the Watcher’s Council, returning on Bank Holidays and the odd weekend here and there to serve cream teas to tourists, and slices of his Father’s famous Victoria sponge to the locals. 

In the mid-50s, John married. The bride’s name was Camilla, and she worked for the Watcher’s Council, as Edna had done decades before. Not as a Watcher like John, but an analyst. Bright hair, brighter eyes, she had a quickness of wit that delighted Edna and puzzled Tom. Within a year, they had welcomed a baby boy into the world.

Rupert. 

A boy burdened with the family business; not the bread and teacakes of his Grandfather’s world, but the death and destruction that had once been his Grandmother’s. 

At eleven, Rupert had been sent to stay with his grandparents for the summer. London, his father had said on one of his rare visits to St. Jerome’s College, was no place for a boy to spend the school holidays. It was too busy, too polluted. Fresh air and green fields were just the ticket for a growing boy, and Devon had both in abundance. Besides, it was high season, and an extra pair of hands at the tearoom would not go amiss. 

Though hesitant at first, feeling more than a little like one the evacuees he had read about in his History lessons, Rupert had quickly grown to love the teashop and the little valley it lay in. In the mornings, he helped his grandfather with the bread and cakes; the afternoons were spent with his grandmother and the two serving girls on the tearoom floor, bringing steaming teapots and mugs with matching saucers to waiting customers; in the evenings he took to paddling in the Dart, riding his bicycle around the winding lanes, or chasing rabbits through the long grass on the edge of the moors. The days were slow, or at least slower than they had been in the city or at school, but no less pleasant for it. 

It was mid-august, and the day had been a warm one. Tourists had flocked to Kitty’s like swallows, filling their bellies with tea and sweet biscuits, and their souls with a sense of contentment. 

“You mind that teapot there, boy,” said Tom, busying himself with the ancient till that sat upon the front counter. He peered down at its contents through his horn-rimmed spectacles, squinting to bring the coins into focus. “It’s scalding hot.” 

“Yes, Grandad,” Rupert replied, collecting the last of the dirty crockery from the tables. 

“And we’ll need four plates. One for you, one for me, one for your Grandma, and one for your Father.”

Rupert hesitated, casting a long, sideways glance towards his grandfather. He frowned.

“He’s coming for tea?” he said.

“Mayhap.” 

“Mother said he was away on business,” Rupert continued with the forthright attitude only an eleven year old could muster. “That he wouldn’t be back all summer.”

Tom paused. He gave Rupert a hard stare over the thick black rims of his glasses. 

“Well, your Ma was mistaken, then, wasn’t she?”

Beams of golden light shone in through the glass front of the tearoom as the sun continued its slow decent through the evening sky. Dust motes danced in the beams, swirling as Rupert moved from table to table. 

“I don’t think he’s coming.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” Tom gently chided. He licked his fingers and began to count the banknotes that seemed to bubble up from the back of the till. “He’ll come. You’ll see.” 

“But he never does! He says he will, and that we’ll go to the seaside or to see the cricket or play in the park, but he never comes. And he won’t this time, either.”

Rupert’s relationship with his father was one that consisted mostly of broken promises. It has been that way for as long as he could remember. Even before he had been sent away to school, his Father had been a rare fixture in his life, leaving for work before sunrise and returning long after his bedtime, if at all. The frequency of such disappointments had not made them any easier to bear, any less hurtful. 

Tom sighed and closed the till. “Such a large amount of cynicism for such a little boy,” he said. “It’s a wonder where you manage to keep it all.”

“I’m not little! I’m eleven, and tall for my age. Everyone says so.”

“Ah, but you’re littler than me.”

“Almost everyone is littler than you, Grandad.”

At six foot five and counting, Tom Giles was a man almost perpetually stood in a stoop. His grey curls brushed against the beams of the tearoom’s ceilings even when hunched. Doorways were to be ducked under, chairs and beds and cars things to be folded into like origami. He was broad, too, with a barrel chest and shoulders that were only just beginning to narrow with age. A giant to Rupert’s eyes. The village Polyphemus, only with four eyes instead of one, his flock the tourists that pass through on their way to Dartmoor. 

“Plates, boy! Plates!” the giant cried, slapping the palm of his hand upon the counter. “Chop chop!”

“I’m going,” Rupert replied with a roll of his eyes, and left for the kitchen. Depositing the cups and saucers in the sink, he shoved his hands in the pockets of his shorts and stalked over towards cupboard where the clean plates lived. With a sigh, he removed three plates from the pile, the white china glinting in the golden sunlight. 

“And whilst you’re back there,” Tom called, “you can pick up the cutlery. Cake knives and forks, please.”

Rupert did as he was bid, fishing silverware from the draw above, and staking it up on the plates. Carefully, he made his way back to the tearoom proper and towards his grandfather. He was stood at one of the tables beside the window, smoothing down the pristine white tablecloth. A large blue teapot sat in the middle of the table, steam curling lazily from its spout. It was surrounded by three cups, complete with saucers, and a sugar bowl. Beside the teapot sat a plate covered with a lace fly screen. Beneath it, Rupert could just about make out the shape of a cake. 

“We’re having cake?” said Rupert as he began to set the table. 

“We’re having tea,” Tom replied. 

Undeterred, Rupert said, “What kind of cake?”

“Madeira.”

“Oh.” Rupert’s face fell. 

“It’s your Father’s favourite.”

“I don’t like madeira cake.”

Tom eased himself down into one of the waiting chairs. The chair creaked, his knees creaked, as did the table when he leant an elbow upon it. With a sigh, he poked Rupert in the shoulder accusingly.

“Don’t you go telling me porky pies, Rupert Giles,” he said. “I’ve seen you eat madeira cake before. Quite happily, I might add.”

“Can’t we have chocolate cake, instead?” Rupert replied with a pout.

“No.”

“Or lemon, or cream?” he continued. “Or even carrot cake?”

“No.”

Rupert sighed heavily, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his shorts. “But madeira cake is so boring.”

His grandfather pinned him with a hard stare, recalling the way his own children had stood upon the tearoom floor, hands in pockets and petulant looks upon their faces. It seemed to Tom that very little changed from one generation to the next. 

“Boring or not,” he said, “you won’t be having any cake at all if you continue that way.”

The look of petulance was replaced by one of contrition. Hands were removed from pockets, eye contact avoided, as an apology tumbled forth from Rupert’s lips. 

“Sorry, Grandad.”

Tom’s face softened. “You can, however, bring that pot of clotted cream to go with it.”

Outside, there came the rumble of a car, engine revving as it made it’s way up the steep high street. It made the glass in the windows rattle as it passed. Tom watched the car, a Mini Cooper in shining red, struggled up the incline. The numberplate was not one he recognised. Day trippers off home, he thought. Not enough mud and dust on the trim for locals. 

Rupert returned as the car rounded the corner at the top off the street and disappeared. Tom watched as he placed the pot of cream upon the table, and began to busy himself with the place settings, worrying the teaspoons until they sat just-so beside the teacups. 

“Tea?” Tom asked as Rupert took the seat opposite. 

“Yes please.”

Tom poured; first the milk, and then the tea. “Two sugars?”

Rupert nodded. He reached for the calipers and dropped two cubes into the steaming liquid, grinning at the ‘plop’ they made.

“Two for your Grandma as well, please, Rupert.” The clock on the far wall chimed the hour. “They’ll be due back any minute. If I’ve timed it right, the tea ’ll be the perfect temperature.” Tom placed a hand over the final cup to stay Rupert’s overzealous use of the sugar bowl. “None for your Father.”

“But what if they’re late?” Rupert asked, staring into his teacup as he stirred, job done. “Father’s always late.” 

“Then we’ll make a fresh pot,” Tom replied simply. 

“And if he doesn’t come?”

“He will,” Tom said. 

Rupert continued to stir his tea, his face falling. “He said he was going to take me down here himself, but he didn’t. Mother said he was too busy and couldn’t spare the time to go get me from school. She said he had some big, important business in France, and that it was selfish of me to expect him to drop everything to drive me here. That I had to wait for Gran.”

An ache settled in Tom’s chest. He thought of John and of William. Of the time he had spent with them, teaching them to fish and to read and to bake bread. Teaching them the local flora and fauna. Running through fields and paddling in streams. And of how much time his son seemed to be squandering with his own. 

“Your Father’s an important man, Rupert,” said Tom. “Sometimes other people need him.”

“I need him, too.”

There was the sound of footsteps outside, followed by the jangle of keys in the door. Tom and Rupert turned to watch as the door swung open, Edna striding purposefully inside. Her face, with all its lines and wrinkles, was set like stone. Her green eyes shining. 

She was alone. 

“Sweetheart?” said Tom.

The door shut behind her, and Edna seemed to crumple inwards then. Less the formidable dragon that had prowled through Rupert’s childhood; now more a little old lady with shaking hands and air of loss. 

“Father isn’t coming is he?”

Edna shook her head. A look passed between Tom and his wife. It was one they had shared before, over twenty years ago. It was a look he remembered so vividly. 

“Rupert,” said Tom gently, “go pop the kettle on. The pot needs a refresh.”

The following day, for the first time since 1943, Kitty’s remained closed, the ovens unlit and the blinds drawn. A week later, when it re-opened, there were two vases upon the counter. One filled with sweet williams. The other with white lilies.


End file.
